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Disk Storage Limits Loom 3-5 Years From Now 220

Posted by timothy from the technological-scenarios dept.
evanbd writes: "According to this article the major disk manufacturers all finally agreed on something. And it's not a good thing. Specifically, they all think that in about 3-5 years, the superparamagnetic limit will kick in and current technology will stop getting better. But wait, there's more. New technology won't be ready for something like ten years. I know superparamagnetism has been discussed before, but I hadn't seen it as quite this bad and this much of a sure thing." No matter how quickly storage advances arrive, there are certain dead ends will inevitably appear.
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Disk Storage Limits Loom 3-5 Years From Now More

Disk Storage Limits Loom 3-5 Years From Now

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  • Re:Clarification (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Honestly, though, who needs a petabyte of space? If you're not doing data archiving and such, why do you even need a disk of that size?

    1994 : Honestly, though, who needs a gigabyte of space? If you're not doing data archiving and such, why do you even need a disk of that size?

    Do you remember that far back? I do. When a 200Mb drive was huge, and a Gb was inconceivable. Look, the faster computers become, the more data they can process in a resonable time. Therefore, the size of data files increases. Think about it, would you store all your MP3's encoded in 64kbps to save space, or would you rather store them at 192kbps and use more space on the drive?

  • Re:Not good news for M$ Bloatware.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    -- The ability to monopolize a planet is insignificant next to the power of the source.

    Wow, a referenece to Star Wars, implications about Microsoft's evil monopoly, and a rah-rah for Open Source, all in a one-line sig!
    I nominate you for karma-whore-sig-of-the-year!

  • Besides, even when manufacturers do reach the size limit, can't we just use a holepunch to double it?

  • No. Limiting factor is LASER frequency. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    CD players use infrared lasers. DVDs achieve higher density by using red lasers. Higher frequencies mean you can read smaller pits on the disc and thus pack more per square inch.

    Note that small devices like these require SOLID STATE lasers. So while a gas discharge laser could produce hire frequencies cheaply, the high voltage apparatus makes for bulky equipment. Forget fitting it and the optical drive into a 5inch PC bay. Some shorter solid state wavelength lasers do exist but are are extremely costly (e.g., green lasers cost around USD$200.00. There are experimental UV LEDs out now. These may one day lead to CD sized discs storing 100GB or more.


  • hasn't been able to be made in reference to the fact that generally standard sizes used today are becoming able to push the output/input limits of our senses on the hardware.

    where's a carmack or sweeney when you need one.

    in terms of audio, sure. in terms of video, a 32bpp color palette only represents a fraction of the precision that the human eye can discern. sizes will still grow, just in different directions.

    Not that I'm saying we're quite there yet, but we are getting close enough to begin thinking about this realistically.

    we're close, but maybe not that close. don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created.

  • Holographic storage has been a "couple of years" away for about 10 years now. So far I've only seen a whole lot of vapor from the holographic storage folks.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • And a drive like this is gonna need some of its own cooling. No big whup - we did it with video cards in the last few years - but as soon as we start exceeing the current form factor, this'll need to be factored in.
  • Consider the source, of course - 'Enterprise Solutions' or whatever. This is the trade mag for companies that make their living selling big, expense storage solutions. These companies have relied on the falling $/Gig of high-end hard drives for their 5-year business plan.

    Interesting that once drives stop getting cheaper, all they can cut to improve price/performance is by reducing the price of their crown jewels - the controllers.
  • Except with the current techology, since it is mechanical the bigger the platters, the slower the drivers become.
    Yes, but no one's saying we're 3-5 years away from reaching the theoretical limit of mechanical technology. While we can't figure out how to get magnetic bits smaller, there's room to discover new ways to get those bits to the head. It's hard, but so is everything. That's why they pay lots of people to think about what to do next.

  • a 32bpp color palette only represents a fraction of the precision that the human eye can discern.

    How big of a fraction? Exactly how many colors can the human eye discern? I thought I had read somewhere that 32bpp had it pretty much covered.

  • MP3? MP3!?

    Once I can buy a 200 Gig harddrive for a reasonable price, I for one am not going to waste my time ripping my CD's to MP3 when I can just store them in some raw audio format... WAV or whatever.

    I think you have the right point, but you are guilty of the same assumptions. :)

    It's very cheap today to put a Gigabyte of RAM in a machine. I wouldn't mind throwing a terabyte of drive space in my server at home for $100. :)

    Still the one big problem that I see is backup storage has not progressed similarly. Tape is still very expensive consider the larger sizes of drives today. I guess now that harddrives appear to be more reliable fewer people worry about this. I still have a 2 Gig DAT drive, yet I have 12 gigs in my server. It's slow and painful.

  • Re:This doesn't mean... (Score:3)

    by Seth Golub ( 3326 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:56AM (#88795) Homepage
    First of all, our storage needs are pretty flexible. If we had ten times as much space, we'd stop using mp3/ogg and switch to a lossless compression scheme. And as digital cameras get better, photos will take up more space.

    But the real problem isn't that no device will be able to hold my data. The problem is that such a device will be much larger than I want. They already are. Right now I need about 34GB (most of which is music). Ideally, I wouldn't need a big chunk of metal under my desk to store it. I'd much prefer to have everything on my laptop or even my iPAQ. If I could fit 100GB on a microdrive, I would use it up tomorrow.
  • I read something that said 33 bits. Could they have come up with a more disappointing number?
    --

  • Re:Plenty of space? (Score:3)

    by cdipierr ( 4045 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:35AM (#88797) Homepage
    While you make a decent point, it's not entirely accurate. Right now IDE ATA-100 drives can theoretically peak up to 100MB/sec. Admittedly this doesn't happen often, but in sequential trasnfers it's common for them to sustain 40MB/sec or so. For non sequential transfers seek time will kill you more than throughput anyway. But you're right that this will ultimately be a bigger problem then it is now.
  • Another trend I think you'll see is home media servers. Essentially network-attached storage on which TiVo's, MP3 players and all the other new and wonderful toys of the near future are going to deposit their trash.
    You mean like this [thinkgeek.com] and this [riohome.com]?

    Now I just need to find a black box that lets me watch the stuff I find on alt.binaries.tv.simpsons [binaries.tv.simpsons]
    --
  • Maybe we'll have to go back to drums [google.com]
  • Just wait 5 years or so until HDTV becomes more mainstream

    Yeah, but the MPAA will take care of our storage needs by making it illegal to record anything...
  • For that five to eight year gap, there is plenty to do still to enable us to cram evermore Divx files and mp3:s on our systems.

    Just because the drives stop becoming bigger, it won't stop them from becoming cheaper (up to a point). Instead of larger drives, we can always turn to adding more of them into a system (which is sort of what the article implies).

    Another way to enlarge the storage would be to bring back the 5 1/4 inch drives - more area = more storage. Add an ultrafast 2.5 inch drive as a cache, and you may get performance almost as good as current drives.

    Of course, this applies mostly to individual systems, where there is room to grow in various ways. For large serverfarms, already scrambling for space and power, this problem is rather more serious. Probably, virtualized storage is the only way forward at that point; there are of course other advantages to that technology besides space, so it may not affect organisations that badly as many of them would be moving towards this technology anyway.

    /Janne
  • Hate to rain on your parade, but competition will _not_ solve any problem... If a problem will take a minimum of theoretical and practical advances, there is a practical limit as to how quickly it will be solved (an if it requires a lot of advances, it will take a lot of time no matter how much money you throw at it). If a problem has no solution, no solution will be found.

    /Janne
  • Uh.

    Mary Poppins??

    At least the Julie Andrews part was right [imdb.com]...unless you want to include Dick Van Dyke. And so on.

  • You mean the one without the gannet?

    They've all got the gannet. It's a standard Julie Andrews tune; it's in all the books.

  • Today, the cost of owning data, even very large quantities of it, is mostly in the backup system. A 40Gb disk costs maybe $200. A 40Gb DLT drive costs maybe $2000. Plus you have to buy tapes at $30/ea to feed the thing, and pay a tech to change the tapes. As a percentage of the cost of ownership of that 40Gb of data, the drive itself is negligible. Even the power and rackspace to hold the drive doesn't amount to much when compared to the backup system.

    Also, nobody's predicting an increase in the cost of disk storage. The net result of this is that disk prices will continue to drop, but less rapidly. Oh dear, how will we survive. In order to support your statement that large raid arrays are going to get huge fast, you have to assume that the rate at which businesses data storage needs increase is equal to the rate at which disk prices have been dropping recently. This assumes the managers have no conscious awareness of the world around them. Why would they choose to massively increase their disk usage, in the face of stable prices, to a degree not justified by anticipated revenues?

    Then again, why would the markets massively overinvest in telecom infrastructure? Some questions just can't be answered, I guess...

    -Graham
  • > Yeah, but the MPAA will take care of our storage needs by making it illegal to record anything...

    Touche!
  • > You mean like this and this?

    Precisely (gotta get me one of those Audiotrons). Except that it will inevitably be taken to the next level with video, and used bi-directionally. In other words, your next DVD player might very well also have an Ethernet port and pull its files from a file server instead. And your next TiVo might very well have an Ethernet port and store its streams on a remote drive. 100BaseT has enough bandwidth for this type of application.
  • > am not going to waste my time ripping my CD's to MP3 when I can just store them in some raw
    > audio format

    Yeah, but once you realize that you're displacing an entire MPEG4 movie with that 650MB album, you might just change your mind. But if you're a ferocious audiophile, fine, have your way .

    > Still the one big problem that I see is backup storage has not progressed similarly.

    Very true, I've made this point a few months (years?) ago. Also, storage interface bandwidth hasn't kept up. Putting 1TB of data onto removable media (ha!) at IDE speeds will have you turning old and gray. Even before that I don't see any obvious and cheap solutions. Frankly, a large IDE drive in a 1394 enclosure that you can remove at any moment seems to me as good as any cartrige system.

  • Wrong storage model (Score:5)

    by uradu ( 10768 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:15AM (#88811)
    > Well, the average user just isn't filling up an 80 gig drive.
    [...]
    > I don't think much more will be needed until more people start using their computers for video recording

    That the whole crux of the matter. Most people that predict that our storage requirements will taper off in the near future apply obsolete usage models. For application and non-multimedia data storage even a 30GB drive will last a long, long time. But as soon as audio and in particular video enter the scene, nothing is too much.

    You seem to think that the main use of multimedia will be on a traditional PC, which couldn't be further from the truth. The future of multimedia computer equipment--in particular storage--belongs to the embedded/set-top market. We've seen the TiVo and the UltimateTV, but those are just the tip of a giant iceberg. Once their costs come down to the $100-$200 range, they will be as common-place as VCRs. Once manufacturers start incorporating PVRs in TVs and cable boxes, the appetite of the market for storage will explode. Just wait 5 years or so until HDTV becomes more mainstream and the same progams require a multiple of the storage space of today.

    Another trend I think you'll see is home media servers. Essentially network-attached storage on which TiVo's, MP3 players and all the other new and wonderful toys of the near future are going to deposit their trash. Once they become plug-and-play, and keeping that re-run of Seinfeld around for all eternity is just a button push away, people will want to store more and more media garbage. As those file servers keep piling up in the living room entertainment center, that terabyte won't seem that large anymore.
  • That wasn't what I said, at all. I am not saying it is possible to predict where the limit will be, and did not say it was likely there ever would be a limit. What I was implying, however, is that the demand for higher storage media will slow down as we approach the level of storage which will allow our current hardware (sound cards, monitors) to fully use their output bandwidth. I'm not saying that better hardware won't come along (3d goggles, or whatever) and I'm not saying there won't be a need to store massive amounts of data for processing (the example you gave.) What I *am* saying is that there will be a upper bound for home storage that will slow down dramatically. If it is possible for you to store enough information on your computer to play DivX movies for the next four years, as well as high quality music for the same time, where is the need for more space on a home box? All other things outside of movies and audio are most likely to require less space since the amount of space required is a function of the resolution of output, in whatever form that may be.

  • Re:Clarification (Score:4)

    by nebby ( 11637 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:11AM (#88813) Homepage
    The difference being that up until this point, the "XX size is always good enough" argument hasn't been able to be made in reference to the fact that generally standard sizes used today are becoming able to push the output/input limits of our senses on the hardware. For example, the human eye only can distinguish certain refresh rate and a certain resolution in pixel and color size.. a screen with this resolution displaying at this refresh rate (with compression perhaps) is a static number of bytes (don't ask me how many.) Once you have storage space/memory space approaching this size, the question "We'll never need more" takes on a bit more validity since the additional storage will not be used for presentation of stuff but only for internal conputation (ie, a 3d universe has a ton of internal information.) Even in a huge 3d game, the amount of space used for the media of presentation will never go beyond a certain resolution (visually or audiably) both in space and time, since our senses can't make the distinction.

    Not that I'm saying we're quite there yet, but we are getting close enough to begin thinking about this realistically.
  • Digital video.

    An uncompressed HDTV stream is 1.5 gigabit/sec. That would fill up a terabyte disk in about 90 minutes.

  • I think you need 10-12 bits per color to eliminate banding. I've read about x-ray display systems that use 16-bit gray scale. 48 bits per pixel should be sufficient. Might as well toss in 16 bits for an alpha channel and make it 64 bits.

  • Already solved.. (Score:5)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:52AM (#88816) Homepage
    Microsoft solved that years ago...

    It's called doublespace....

    OW!, Stop hitting me!

  • I just add a new large drive every 6 months or so.. my last one was 60Gb and cost $175.. am about ready to add a new one again and am thinking of adding an 80gb drive.. am not overly worried about the problem at this time. :)

  • Do you have... (Score:5)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:26AM (#88822)
    superparamagnetism?
    Are you troubled by spooks, spectres or ghosts?
    Have you had an out-of-body experience?
    We are ready to believe you!

    Who ya gonna call?
    GHOSTBUSTERS!

    --

  • Re:This doesn't mean... (Score:4)

    by rw2 ( 17419 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:54AM (#88823) Homepage
    And who the fuck can fill up a terabyte in an appreciable amount of time?

    I can.

    Of course I work for a major high energy physicis lab, so YMMV... ;-)

    --
    Poliglut [poliglut.com]

  • Sorry again. It is definitely from "My Fair Lady." Sound of Music has a completely different writing team ("I Could Have Danced All Night" is by Lerner and Lowe, and "Sound of Music" is by Rodgers and Hammerstein). Julie Andrews did play Eliza Doolittle on Broadway. Audrey Hepburn played her in the film. Rex Harrison played Higgins in both. Oddly enough, Eliza's singing in the movie was done neither by Ms. Hepburn nor by Ms. Andrews. It was a woman named Marnie Nixon, who also sang for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I."
  • You could reduce the ambient thermal energy by cooling, however every time you turned off your computer the disk drive would warm up and you would lose all your data. Not a very practical solution.

  • To take it to a LAN party of course.
  • Yes, but if you think about it, at previous points in time a drive that was a year or two old would almost always be filled to the brim and while the newest drives seemed huge, you always were able to fill them up. With current drives you have to work hard to fill them up, and that trend will probably continue till once we reach that theoretical limit we should have atleast a couple of years breathing room before we catch back up with outselves.
  • No, you just did an increase of 20 percent per year. its just like sales tax take 80+80*1.2 for the first year and you get 176 (which is a bit more than double.. its interesting that your figure is actually less than double 80, I don't quite see how something can increase by 120 percent per year and not double in 3 years.
    Anyways and easier way to do that is 80*2.2*2.2*2.2 That way you have the 80*1.2 plus the original 80 which makes it 2.2. Anyways, easy example. Sales tax here is .07 if I have 2 dollars and I said that the amount of money I had to pay increased by 7% I would just say 2*1.07=2.14 seems right to me.
  • I didn't say indefinatly. Just that it should hold us till we can come out with something better. Seriously, who uses 80GB nowadays, now in 3 years 80GB will be nothing. but the 800GB will be huge, which should give us a few years to figure out how to break the barrier that we reach. No big deal really.
  • 5.25" floppies first??? When do you get out of nappies? I still remember 8" floppies ;)

  • Re:Clarification (Score:3)

    by jmauro ( 32523 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:04AM (#88843)
    Except with the current techology, since it is mechanical the bigger the platters, the slower the drivers become. Due to more torque need to spin the platters and more effort to make sure the platters spin in a blanced settings. Making them physically bigger fights against speed. You can have a bigger drive, but it will be slower, not much of an improvement.
  • A single limitation like this doesn't mean much. This just means consumer-level hard drive manufacturers will spend more time competing on speed until the next breakthrough is ready.

    Given that I/O speed is still such a huge bottleneck for many operations, and given that you can already have 240 gigs of storage for under a grand, is this really such a bad thing?

  • Good Lord! We'll all have to buy RAID arrays just to install Windows 2010!

    Gee, that's a whole new twist on "2010: A Space Odyssey."

  • Re:Clarification (Score:3)

    by dustman ( 34626 ) <dlearyNO@SPAMttlc.net> on Thursday July 12, 2001 @12:56PM (#88847)

    For example, the human eye only can distinguish certain refresh rate and a certain resolution in pixel and color size.. a screen with this resolution displaying at this refresh rate (with compression perhaps) is a static number of bytes (don't ask me how many.)


    These limits are high enough that we'll still need the exponential growth for quite awhile before the limit is hit... 1200 dpi laser printers are pretty much the limit for humans (although 600 dpi is probably enough... it's better than I can detect... I can see the pixels in 300dpi printout though)... at 600dpi, a wide aspect ratio monitor (to be easy, says its 16x9 inches) will be about 52M pixels... and each pixel, at 3 bytes (24 bit color), brings the memory usage per frame to 150MB... currently, movies are at 24 fps, so thats 3.7GB per second of uncompressed video... and, of course, the frame rate can go a lot higher (any good quake player will tell you that the game is noticeably better if the frame rate never drops below 60, rather than 40)...

    if you were to store this quality video uncompressed, suddenly a petabyte isn't even enough for a whole movie! and even if you had 1000:1 compression, it's still not large enough that you will never fill it up..
  • 4 platters? Certainly in a full-height (~1 1/4") 3.5" drive. Those can hold 6 platters. Not in a standard (~5/8") high 3.5" drive, though. 2 is the most I've seen there.
  • You can put in more platters, and more heads. It used to be common that drives lots of platters. As storage densities went up, it became cheaper to have less platters, and more storage on each one. If we reach a limit of storage, then we can go back to adding more platters.

  • Re:This doesn't mean... (Score:5)

    by p3d0 ( 42270 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:58AM (#88852)
    And who the fuck can fill up a terabyte in an appreciable amount of time? I know I could fill up 100GB in a week or so but a terabyte?
    Apparently it would take you ten weeks.
    --
  • Sorry to you both - it's from "The Sound of Music" which DEFINITELY starred Julie Andrews in the movie.

    At least I'm very sure of it. Someone let me know how I may be wrong. I've never seen "My Fair Lady" but I'm pretty sure I've seen the song sung in a movie, that's why I'm pretty sure it's NOT from that...

  • superparamagnetism (Score:5)

    by brianvan ( 42539 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:18AM (#88855)
    ex-pe-al-i-do-cious...

    (Apologies to Julie Andrews...)
  • Neat, but as far as I can tell, this is WORM storage, not write many, so it's more like a replacement for CD-R than normal HDs. Of course, I could have misunderstood the article.

    Still, it's an interesting concept - melting little dents into the media for bits. I imagine that they're going to have to do some hard research into how to get rid of excess heat along with it.

    Could be that one day, when you say your hard drive melted, it really melted.


    ÐÆ

  • Re:Not worried. It just means a different focus. (Score:4)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:56AM (#88869)
    This is actually a really big bad thing. While for home consumers it likely means faster read times, and a return to bulky hard disks, this will suck for businesses that need mass storage.

    Once the storage capacity of a hard disk can only increase by adding platters, large raid arrays are going to get huge fast. Massive databases will take up huge amounts of physical space, eat up a ton of power to run, and that is really, really expensive.

    So yes, this IS a problem.
  • So in 5 years when we hit a wall i'll just have to buy 2 or 3 900gigabyte drives for 80 dollars a piece instead of 1 1.5tearbyte drive at currently levels? damn those technological walls!

    hehe i crack myself up :)

  • I think that 1TB should hold us for a while

    Don't you know saying things like that will come back to haunt you? =)

    Future person: "1TB? Ha! That's less than half the space I use just for Win2007, much less all my holovids!"
  • You know, there really needs to be a "Punny" moderation tag... although I can't decide if it'd mod up or down.
  • Um, the major reason for costs dropping (and data rates increasing) is the increase in density. When density flatlines you can always add more (and bigger) platters to increase the amount of data, but it becomes more expensive to build these larger drives. This cost will be offset by increases in manufacturing technology, but gone will be the days of exponential growth.

    So, this /does/ directly affect the consumer's wallet.
  • Exactly. As nebby points out above, a lossless 16x9 rendering of motion video could easily exceed a petabyte for a movie. Cube the amount of storage and people will be thinking holographic representations of the same density. There will always be a demand for more storage; our technological progress is often limited by the practicality of the storage medium.

  • "My God, it's full of drives!"

    Yes I know that's 2001, sorry

  • Quite frankly, I agree. It would be good to have a 5 year break from size increases, to focus on faster read times. Just like with CPU MHz, everyone focuses on one number, and forgets that other things are important too. I admit, I'm guilty of this sometimes too, but as long as the population at large overlooks hd speed, it's harder to get info on it.

    For the time being, we have plenty of space for home use (I have a two year old 35 gig hard drive, and I still have plenty of room). We'll fill it up at some point in the future, of course, but I expect that it would be after we get other viable media. And if you REALLY need more space NOW, start burning DVDs.

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

  • Re:Clarification (Score:5)

    by ReelOddeeo ( 115880 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:59AM (#88890)
    Honestly, though, who needs a petabyte of space?

    You, sir, have obviously not tried to install the latest betas of Windows XP.

    --

  • currently, movies are at 24 fps, so thats 3.7GB per second of uncompressed video

    The eye itself spatio-temporally compresses data as it is sent to the eye, apparently using a wavelet multiresolution. The eye and brain also can't see as much detail on a moving object as on a stationary one.

  • This doesn't mean... (Score:5)

    by talonyx ( 125221 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:22AM (#88894)
    ...that we'll run out of space.
    Look! We will have 200GB drive soon, right, there was a /. article about that.
    We'll have 400GB drives in 3 years, maybe a nice round number like 512GB will be the upper limit. Maybe 256GB.
    But then you think... I can have a PHYSICALLY BIGGER hard drive! A full-height 5 1/4 one, like the old IBM PC ones, but with superdense and 10000RPM spinning platters.
    So that could bring me up to maybe 512GB, or more.
    Then I could have an even bigger one, two-times the height, with a terabyte on it.
    And who the fuck can fill up a terabyte in an appreciable amount of time? I know I could fill up 100GB in a week or so but a terabyte? It would take a long time to find enough pr0n and warez to fill up all that space.

    Relax, people, we're coming to the point at which things are going to slow down a bit. Compression technology is getting more advanced, and there's plenty of room an a 1TB hard drive for some 1GB DivX ;-) movies. Never mind the fact that DVD burners are coming down in price to provide us with an acceptably-sized external storage medium.

    There's no crisis here. Companies will still sell hard drives. The spice will still flow.
  • Something I've found interesting is the trend of storage media. Take a look at the floopy. At first, you had a 5 1/4 inch disk. Then you had programs and spanned multiple 5 1/4 inch disks. Then 3 1/2 became very popular. Then programs spanned (spun?) multiple 3 1/2 inch disks. (Insert talk about densities as well)
    Now we're coming to multiple CDs. Soon we'll be receiving programs on DVD technology.

    Maybe the hard disk industry will act in the same way. We've now pushed this type of media to the limit, perhaps another will emerge.

    Unless this talk of bit-flipping is not a result of how our disk drives work . . . can anyone clarify?
  • Without being able to increase density, that leaves disk designers two areas to increase: read head movement speed, and disk rotation speed.

    And more platters, more heads per platter, heads moving individually instead of together, as well as good old-fashioned caching.

  • I can have a PHYSICALLY BIGGER hard drive! A full-height 5 1/4 one, like the old IBM PC ones, but with superdense and 10000RPM spinning platters. So that could bring me up to maybe 512GB, or more.

    Remember, big means slow, as they will tear apart if you run them too fast. It would be better to add more platters.

    And who the fuck can fill up a terabyte in an appreciable amount of time?

    Well, what's the write speed of the disk?

    Seriously, if you are working with seismic data, it's obviously not a problem. I guess experimental nuclear physicists and radio-astronomers feel the same way. And, as storage capacity increases, I can certainly not see the media industy having problems using it all up (I guess Industrial light and magic already do).

    Even for home users, it is hard to see an end to the cry for storage space. Ok, you can store a lot of mp3's now, but not really that many DVD-quality movies. And DVD is certainly not the end of the search for better quality. Remember the hype around VR a few years ago? How much storage will your average Holodeck need?

  • Cost (Score:2)

    by oman_ ( 147713 )
    So maybe the drives will not get bigger but I'm sure they can always be faster, quieter and cheaper.

  • Clarification (Score:5)

    by AntiNorm ( 155641 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:20AM (#88910)
    Specifically, they all think that in about 3-5 years, the superparamagnetic limit will kick in and current technology will stop getting better

    Clarification: It's not that hard drives won't keep getting bigger and bigger. It's just that you'll have problems fitting more data into less space. The result of this is that when the 1 TB hard drives come out, they will of course be larger in size than the 80 GB hard drives of today, despite the advances in technology that will no doubt be available by then.

    ---
  • So just because technology X is new and "better" than technology Y, nobody should care about Y any more? That's pretty simplistic.

    Even if Millipede does come to market (a big if) and does so in a predictable time frame (even bigger if) and actually does perform as promised (I won't even go there), there will be a transition period, during which both technologies will compete. During that period, it will be very stupid to say, "Millipede is better, let's not even look at magnetic disks." Predicting what will happen during that period requires an understanding of both technologies.

    Consider monitors. The standard technology is still the CRT. These devices practically define "klunky" and "old fashioned". (Even the name is klunky and old-fashioned. They're called "Cathode Ray Tubes" instead of "Electron Beam Tubes" because the basic technology predates the discovery of the electron!) LCD technology is clearly "better": clearer display, less energy, fewer strained backs... But CRT monitors persist because for most of us, the price/performance level just isn't there.

    __

  • A more technically detailed article [sciam.com] can be found at Scientific American [sciam.com]. This is not really new news.

    If we hit the limits of current technology in 5 years, and the new stuff is 10 years away, we'll just have drives getting bulkier for 5 years. No big deal.
  • You mean we have to worry about space (might as well add cpu/memory) efficency?

    If you ask me, we shoulda been worrying about even when the technology was/is cheap.....

    --
  • Why? Have you seen the size of the stuff that people were using as raid boxes a few years ago?
    If it fit then, it'd fit now.

    Besides, the concept of RAID is a large number of inexpensive disks, more small HDD's, more redundancy.

    The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit:
    Pissing off coffee drinking /.'ers since Spring 2001.

  • Some poeple never have enough (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:28AM (#88919) Journal
    I know one guy, now that he has a gigahertz machine and 100 gig of hard drive and a 1.5 gig of ram, chokes it all with 200 to 300 meg graphics files. And complains that he never had this problem with slower machines.

    So in a way, this will be good becauase it will make people program without the potential of infinite expansion.

    Yes the guy is clueless.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Honestly, though, who needs a petabyte of space?

    Really. 640k should be enought for anyone.
  • 150Gb/in^2 seems like a lot...but let's see here.

    3.5" drive which has a platter radius of about 1.5"...minus an 0.5" spindle gives us a size of 6.28"^2 per platter. At 4 platters per drive (it's normally 4, right?) and two sides per platter (right?) that's 50.24"^2.

    Now, assuming we can safely put 135Gb/in^2 (90% of the superparamagnetic limit), we're looking at 6782.40 Gb/disc==847GB.

    Assuming I can stash three or four hard drives per commodity PC box, that looks like 3.4TB of pr0n^H^H^H^HMP3s.

    And that sounds like a lot. But then again, where would I put the 150 circa 1996 500MB drives that I would need to hold my 75GB of crap, eh?

  • Plenty of space? (Score:3)

    by zzen ( 190880 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:50AM (#88925)
    Actually, if 1TB is the possible ceiling for a personal HD in several years - I think we are not talking as much about how to FILL 1TB of data rather then how to MOVE IT arount.

    Because while the HD capacity doubles every time and then, take a look how much the drive throughput developed in the last decade - while we have Ultra160 SCSI or UltraATA 100, the drives don't deliver more then some crawling 20MB/sec, anyway. And they have been at these speeds (orders of magnitude) for a long time.

    So - 1 TB of data is rather problematical to use, without heavy indexing - and even then. Because the biggest bottleneck right now is not the processor, not the HD capacity - but the system throughput (IO,motherboard,RAM etc.)

  • Re:New storage tech? (Score:3)

    by bbh ( 210459 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:48AM (#88935)
    A number of storage manufacturers have been working on holographic storage along with DARPA and many universities. DARPA has the the Holographic Data Storage System (HDSS) consortium and the PhotoRefractive Information Storage Materials (PRISM) consortium, and IBM, Rockwell and another companies have been working on this. Here is a Scientific American blurb about it:

    http://sciam.com/2000/0500issue/0500toigbox5.html [sciam.com]

    Also here is IBM's page about it:

    http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/projects/holography/ [ibm.com]

    bbh
  • How many platters are in the current 3.5"x1" ATA 80GB drives? Seems like just by going back to the 5.25" full-height format we could hit 250-300GB with today's technology. I don't see that as too big a sacrifice.

    A 4-bay RAID case for FH 5.25" drives is about the size of a mini-tower. That's 1200GB in a PC-size format. That's not too bad... And a desktop mid-tower could probably hold two drives. So I think it wouldn't be too hard to keep home users in 1000GB or so without needing lots of extra space.

    Isn't 1000GB on a desktop system enough to hold us for 5 years or so?
  • Why do we need 10,000 RPM? What about 7,200 or even 5,400? I've seen 5.25" drives at both of these rotational speeds.

    The current DiamondMax 80MB drive is a 5,400 RPM drive and it still gives transfer rates good enough for full motion NTSC (720x480) video at 2:1 compression. And I get 30+MB/sec sustained out of my 7200RPM IDE drives that are (now) a generation old.

    With such high data density, I don't see the speed issue, especially since even PCs are now starting to use RAID-0 or RAID-5 on a regular basis.
  • I think unlike a few years ago, we're at a point now where storage capacity is cheap and overabundant. Most new systems come with 40+G drives and 95% of the people who buy them probably never use anything more than 10G... ever.

    Am I reading the 120% rule correcting in saying that the INCREASE in drive capacity per year is 120% or that the next generation will be 120% of the current generation (ie, 20% higher). If the former, then in 3 years we could be seeing 850 GB drives for the consumer. That would pretty much hold all of my CD and DVD collection.

    -S

  • Not that big of a deal for manufacturers (Score:3)

    by ageitgey ( 216346 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:48AM (#88942) Homepage
    All of the computer makers are currently facing declining sales. Some is to blame for dot coms folding and less businesses buying computers, but many feel that comsumer sales have slowed because that 500hz computer they bought last year is just fine. It's not like the days of 286s where each jump was a major improvement for end users. Most people aren't having a problem reading mail or browsing the web with an "obsolete" 500mhz computer. They just don't see the need for a 1.5ghz model. What does this have to do with hard drives?

    Well, the average user just isn't filling up an 80 gig drive. They don't want 200gig drives. So even if we hit a brick wall in terms of storage per inch, I just don't think the commodity market will be harmed. Once 256gig drives and the like are avaliable to end users, I don't think much more will be needed until more people start using their computers for video recording and other high storage requirements. And if the embedded device manufacturers have their way, that will never happen. Remember the niche markets like video editing don't drive the commodity market.

    Maybe an upper limit on drives will just decrease the number of models a retailer has to sale and thus increase profit. Plus maybe this will give researchers more time to focus on speeding up existing drives and improving reliability.

  • Who cares? Nanotech will take over. (Score:4)

    by mookoz ( 217805 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:21AM (#88943)
    IBM's Millipede [ibm.com] project is supposed to be viable within the next 5-10 years. So who cares about the clunky old magnetic technology anymore?

  • The Julie Andrews Dirty Songbook (the expurgated version).



    You mean the one without the gannet?

  • The mother of ***** (Score:3)

    by Traicovn ( 226034 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @10:21AM (#88948) Homepage
    Necessity is the mother of invention. Limits are there. We will eventually reach them
    But we will advance, just like we have before. I remember the over-used phrase '28k oughta be enough for anybody.' Nowadays your considered insane to try to run ANYTHING on system with less then 48-64mb. Your considered legacy hardware. As the need advances the technology will. The more IN DEMAND something is, the more R&D dollars that will be spent on it, the more important it will become. There are alternatives out there, and we will eventually find them. We just have to keep looking.

    I'm personally surprised that we are still using magnetic storage. A few years ago people were predicting that OPTICAL would be the way to go. But apparently it wasn't. Magnetic devices prices got driven down as the technology became cheaper and more in-demand.

    Who knows where we may be five to ten years from now, perhaps everything will be stored at a remote location for most people and it will be accessed via thin-clients. Perhaps everyone will have their own miniature raid-aray. Perhaps everything will be stored on miniature removable media, but applications will be served from the net. It will be interesting to find out. But I don't think that we need to worry, as long as we continue to inovate, we will find a solution.

    [Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
  • Gee, that's a whole new twist on "2010: A Space Odyssey."
    Not to be a mega nerd nitpicker, but Arthur Clarke titled the sequel "2010: Odyssey Two." The cinematic adaptation was "2010: The Year We Make Contact."

  • A new law of computers (Score:5)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:33AM (#88952)

    Your comment gave me a wonderful burst of insight, which I will state as follows:

    Dasunt's Law - Everything inside a computer will evolve to a state where it requires active cooling.

    1st Corollary - Computers will replace furnaces as a source of heating in the home.

    2nd Corollary - Within ten years, computers will come with air conditioning, and will require ducting to the outside.

    3rd Corollary - The richest man in the world in the next century won't make his fortune from software, but from the sale of electricity.

  • And wasn't it Bill Gates that said something along the lines of, "I can't imagine why anyone would want more than 64K of RAM?"

    Let's be clear: people will always want more space, performance, and frames per second. We will always be pushing the limits.

    If you think things are slowing down, just take a look at the various curves related to number of transistors in a cubic centimeter, density of bits in various storage devices, etc. The singularity is still coming sometime between 2025 and 2035.

  • Sorry, I have to nit-pick. The more in-demand something is the higher the price will be; it's a simple supply/demand curve

    Only if the supply is fixed, which is not the case. The principal cost of any high tech gadget is the technology. The more buyers those costs are spread over the lower the cost per item. Competition will drive prices down to the cost of production.

    Perhaps US schools should stop teaching economics altogether since a little learning appears to be more dangerous than none. Or maybe economists should stop calling their theories 'laws' as if they were doing physics rather than soft science.

  • The quote was "Nobody needs more than 640 K of RAM."

    And like all the best quotes Gates never said it.

    What he did say was that 640K would be enough for most people using the original IBM PC, which had a 16 bit microprocessor running at 8 MHz, no memory management and a hard limit of 1Mb of addressable memory. 640K of RAM cost several times the price of the machine at that time.

    Given that the 286 was comming down the pipe and that at the time nobody knew that Intel was going to screw up the memory management it was not a ridiculous design choice which was made by IBM in any case.

  • And who the fuck can fill up a terabyte in an appreciable amount of time?

    64k should be enough for anyone...

  • you dont' even need 5'1/4" drives again (slower rotation).

    all you need to do is add extra 3.5" platters. go back to 3.5" full height drives with 10 platters. You'll still have 7200 RPM
  • Hmmm ... well, I am no good at predicting the future, but I remember when people used to say the same thing about 1 gig, and then 10 gig drives. And the consumption has increased as the size increases.

    -CrackElf

  • ok, a bit OT, but I can't resist:

    Ghandi never wore shoes, so as a result, his feet became very tough and thick. In addition, he never ate very much which is why he was so frail. Also, his unusual diet gave him very bad breath. This is why he became know as the...

    Super calloused fragile mystic plaiged with halatosis.

    More apologies to Julie Andrews

  • I don't know if I am being too simplist. But for me, the solution is bigger storage devices, if we can't put more bits on a surface, and we need to store more bits, let's build a bigger surface.

    Please, correct me if I'm being too simplist


    Don't worry, I'm too simplist [to|every]day

  • A full-height 5 1/4 one, like the old IBM PC ones, but with superdense and 10000RPM spinning platters.

    Watch out! Bigger drives, at bigger RPM values, means much higher linear speed near the disk border. Don't forget we have momentum and inertial forces involved. That might be the problem!

  • Just so long as prices keep dropping. (Score:5)

    by CathodeJack ( 412098 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @12:23PM (#88981)

    The result of this is that when the 1 TB hard drives come out, they will of course be larger in size than the 80 GB hard drives of today

    The way I see it, only laptops and other small physical footprint devices will be affected by this. For the rest of us, this will just mean the ressurrection of the 5.25" Full Height drive bay (Remember those?).

    The article, as far as I read it, makes no mention on what's most important to most drive purchasers: the price. Most computer users out there look for storage solutions that will fit within their budget, not just their computer case.

    So long as the $/MB ratio keeps dropping even after the physical size restriction is reached, I'll still be pretty happy. And I can see no reason why it shouldn't. Once the maximum paramagnetically allowed data density has been reached, the only venue for drive companies to compete with each other will be drive price.

    I also suspect the drive manufactures will start concentrating on making their drives faster as another field of competition. So instead of seeing more and more sodding enormous drives, we'll start seeing merely huge drives that are either really really cheap or really really fast. And that's just fine by me.

  • Re:Optical drives... (Score:3)

    by X-Guy ( 459026 ) on Thursday July 12, 2001 @11:18AM (#88993)
    There aren't any advances to be made in optical drives. We reached the diffraction limit years ago. The diffraction limit comes long before the superparamagnetic limit. You could do near- field optics to beat that, but that has proven to be difficult mechanically because of the close proximity required between head and media.
  • Good Lord! We'll all have to buy RAID arrays just to install Windows 2010!

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